Community Partner Highlight - Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias (INER)#
This blog post is part of a series highlighting the Catalyst Project’s Community Partners, who are using the Catalyst Project cloud infrastructure to further various projects in the biosciences. Community Partners also play a vital role in shaping our governance model to help us sustain, scale and maximise impact in Latin America, Africa, and under-served communities around the world.
In this blog post, Yalbi I. Balderas-Martinez shares how partnering with the Catalyst Project is impacting the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias (INER) in México.
Could you introduce yourself to our readers? Tell us about your organisation/institute/project and the research the members of your community are working on right now.
Our community is called INER, as we work at the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases in México City. We are interested in research and in medical education. For example, we are working on an institutional project related to pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) detection using a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) dataset.
We are using the Catalyst Platform to implement machine learning algorithms that will classify radiology images, with a view to improving patient outcomes. This project is also being used to teach medical students how artificial intelligence can be implemented in a public clinical environment. In this project, we are projecting that more than 15 people are going to be included.
“The Catalyst Project is helping us to collaborate more efficiently and work remotely.”
What are you specifically using the cloud infrastructure for? What kinds of data are stored there? What software packages does your community use?
At this moment this is a local collaboration, involving three departments at INER. We use Python with PyTorch, as well as different machine-learning models. We use a DICOM dataset, .jpg and .csv files.
The Catalyst Project is enabling our community to work more efficiently and collaboratively, and we are also planning to use the platform for implementing AI workshops.
Can you tell us about your experience with the Catalyst Project so far? E.g., have you participated in any training options through Catalyst? What have you enjoyed most so far?
We have been participating in all of the training offered by Catalyst, including the Hub Champion Training, Carpentries Instructor Training delivered by MetaDocencia, and the OLS Open Seeds program.
A screenshot of the INER-Catalyst Team collaborating remotely thanks to the Catalyst Project.#
Photo courtesy of Yalbi I. Balderas-Martinez.